192 - The race for Tunisia turns into a crawl - WW2 - April 30, 1943

by Panzer
oh, man, they lost 13 ships?
Man, that’s rough for the convoy.
Huh?
They took down 7 U-Boats?
and badly damage 5 more?
Wow.
No, that’s true, we don’t see that.
Gee, wonder if it’ll continue.
In warfare you very much want to deceive your enemy as to your intentions.
Make him think left when you’re going right, make him think zig when you’re going to
zag.
There are many ways to achieve this, and we see one of them on display this week.
It is the use of a planted corpse.
I’m Indy Neidell; this is World War Two.
Last week, one of Japan’s major military men, Commander of the Combined Fleet Isoroku
Yamamoto, was killed by an American air attack.
Allied attacks on Axis transports to Tunisia were wildly successful, but Allied attacks
on the ground there met very stiff resistance.
And plans continued for Operation Husky, an Allied summer invasion of Sicily.
8th Army Commander Bernard Montgomery thinks they for that operation they should concentrate
south of Syracuse and land in the Gulf of Noto.
They could cover this with planes from Malta.
Then they could hit Syracuse itself, and the ports of Augusta and Catania.
Arthur Tedder, in charge of Mediterranean Air Command, and Andrew Cunningham, Mediterranean
Fleet Commander, want a much larger beachhead, though, all the way around to Gela, to deal
with the airfields at Comiso and Ponte Olivo, but Monty says they’d need more force for
that.
They have a conference at Algiers the 29th, with Oliver Leese as Monty’s acting Chief
of Staff since Freddie de Guingand was hurt in a plane crash.
Leese is in favor of a combined British and American attack against the southeast corner
of the island.
The Americans would hit both sides of the Pachino Peninsula and the British the Gulf
of Noto.
Cunningham and Tedder say no to this because it does not address quite a few Italian air
bases, which they feel puts both allied air power and allied shipping in danger.
Monty still says he doesn’t have the force for doing all of that, though best case he
could at least deny those airfields’ use to the enemy.
“For Eisenhower, this evidently irreconcilable conflict was yet further evidence of ‘the
fundamental weakness of our entire strategic plan.’”.